Color With Live : Tutorial Vault (Ableton - Extension)

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CWL Tutorial Vault
Ableton Live Extension | Version 1.0.0 | Requires Live 12 Suite 12.4.5 or later
Extensions are currently in Ableton's public beta. Joining is free at ableton.com/beta
No audio included. Videos stream from YouTube and require an internet connection.

I have watched more tutorials than I have finished tracks.

Not slightly more. Embarrassingly more.

You know the pattern. Someone explains the one thing about kick layering that nobody else explained, and it lands. You try it that night. It works. So you keep watching, because there is another video, and the one after that looks better, and free information is the most addictive thing on the internet for a producer who has not finished a song in a month.

But a week later the session is open, the idea is half remembered, and the video is gone. Buried in a watch history two hundred deep, behind a podcast you never finished and a clip you do not remember opening.

So you did not learn it. You visited it.

I am a bit ADHD, which means I can binge an entire night of production knowledge and wake up with the same eight bars I had yesterday. Information was never the problem. There is too much of it and most of it is free. The problem is that everything I learned lived somewhere else. In a browser. On a phone. One tab away from a feed built to eat the rest of my night.

Nothing sticks until you use it. Nothing gets used if you cannot find it. And nothing becomes an idea of your own until you have run it enough times to forget where you got it.

So I built the thing I wanted.

Ableton opened Live up to Extensions this year. After a long stretch of banging my head against the wall, this is what came out.

CWL Tutorial Vault puts your entire tutorial library inside Live.

Right click any track and the Vault opens.
Paste a YouTube link and the video saves with its title and thumbnail.
Press play and it runs inside Live, next to your session.
Write in the notepad underneath, and your notes stay attached to that video permanently.
Save a link with a timestamp and it starts at the good part.

The Vault opens with a few categories already labeled, so you are not staring at a blank screen on day one. DRUMS. BASS. VOCALS. MIXING. After that it is yours. Add your own categories, rename anything, delete what you never use. Inside every category you build groups, which work like sub folders. Under DRUMS you might keep KICKS, TOP LOOPS and HI HATS, so the video that taught you to layer claps sits exactly where you will look for it at 2am with a session open. Every name is editable. Click it and type.

A preset is an entire vault. Keep one for SPEED GARAGE, one for PIANO HOUSE, one for the artist whose sound you are trying to decode. Share preset turns the whole collection into a code. Send the code, your friend hits Import preset, and every video, group and note lands in their Vault. Build a curriculum once and hand it to everyone you produce with. Load your own logo and the Vault becomes yours.

Version 1.0.0. Feature ideas, bugs and wild requests go to team@colorwithlive.com